I'm sorry to reply this late, but thanks for the Stack metaphor, it's
definitely helps in visualizing recursion, perhaps that is how
recursive methods are called internally.

I was trying to refresh my memory on Binary Trees and came accross this site:
http://www.oopweb.com/Algorithms/Documents/PLDS210/VolumeFrames.html

".... if a data structure may be defined recursively, it may be
processed by a recursive function ..."

Some of the valuable things taught in school are hardly encouraged or
even recognized in the fast-paced business world :-( .

Mukul Gandhi wrote:

> If you understand how stack works, you can easily visualize
> recursion.

 I think this is pretty true for the general case.  One well-known
exception to this (there are maybe others, but I don't know them) is
the tail-recursion.

 If the recursive call of your recursive function (or template, or
method or whatever) is at the very end of the function's body, there is
an optimisation opportunity.  The processor can reuse the stackframe
instead of pushing a new one at the top of the stack (depending maybe
on some rewritings of the code, I don't know).

Regards,

--drkm